Why do some books make a profound impression on you whilst others leave you cold? A Perfect Spy is well written, competently plotted and full of well-observed characters. It deals with profound human issues – can one ever really know another human heart? Why are we loyal to spouses, friends, countries or ideologies? How will we react under extreme conditions? If someone had given me a potted summary before reading the book I would have expected to enjoy it. And yet..I reached the end of this book entirely indifferent to the fate of the nominal (anti-) hero Magnus Pym. The question is why?
Part of the answer, I think, is the sheer length of the book. I remember at about page 300 wondering when le Carré intended to get to the meat of the story. No doubt he felt that the long account of the picaresque life of his con-man father, Rick, was critical to how Magnus turned out. But it felt to me that le Carré had written two separate tales which never truly came together; the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
Another problem is the relentless detail, which seems to pour out of le Carré’s pen (or laptop) like water flowing over Niagara. At first it feels exhilarating but soon the thrill of all this verbal fecundity becomes frankly tedious. To take but one example at random, did we really need to know of Rick’s Ascot mansion that it had ‘white fencing running down the drive and a row of tweed suits louder than the admiral’s, and a pair of mad red setters, and a pair of two-toned country shoes for walking them, and’…so on for page after page. I had to keep reminding myself that this story was being written by Magnus in hiding, expecting at any point to be found and probably killed by one side or the other.
The core of the story revolves around how and why Magnus agrees to become a double agent. I couldn’t see any evidence that he found the other side (the Czechs, as if it mattered) morally superior to his own. Morality didn’t seem to come into it. Or perhaps there was an element of personal morality, or at least guilt, as the agent who recruited him was a German whom he had betrayed as a young man. Whatever the reason, Magnus chose a path that required him to deceive and betray everyone he knew until the inevitable day when his defection would be discovered.
Perhaps it’s the Cold War setting that is part of the problem. All that spying, what did it really achieve? Did it have any role in bringing down the Berlin Wall or was it all just a ridiculous, if occasionally deadly, side-show? After reading this book I have to conclude that I don’t really care.
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